Hello world! 6,March 2006
Posted by infomlbunyipau in Uncategorized.trackback
Jay suggests that we run with two Blogs. One for our project and one for the Unworkshop. Seems like a good idea and might help get some discussion underway betwen us all.
I have been surfing through the InformL Unworkshop wiki pages and browsing what the team have posted on their Blogs through the SuperGlu aggregator. We are indeed a diverse bunch of people pointing in many different directions. At the moment I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the enormous range of material that I seem to need to read,digest and apply.
I have been in similar situations before and survived and loook forward to begining to get on top of the challenge. One dissapointment has been the discovery that HTML has not been completely buried and hidden from WEB 2.0 users in appiications like Blogger and Wikis. I had formed the (eronious) idea that “The Geeks” had final accepted that they should not force us mere mortals into mastering their language. Just because I remember how wordprocessing “took off” when WISIWIG software arrived about 20 years ago.
So it seems that I should be able to use HTML if I am to make full use of a Wiki. After a search I find that Blogger expects me to work in HTML in order to post my mug shot to my profile and to format comments. Very sad. If someone as experienced as Dave Ferguson (Agam Fhéin) can run into obstacles what chance do I have.
This is bad news. To me that means these applications suffer from what I would describe as incomplete developmet. A pity because that will stop me recommending such tools to the non tech (point & click only) user. Whilst their numbers may be shrinking they will in my,long held, opinion remain a significant proportion of the population and are the people who must be able to use web2.0 if the exciting possibilities are to become a reality.
Peter, my own opinion is that “Web 2.0″ is more of a figure of speech than an actual platform or set of standards. There’s a close-enough-is-good-enough spirit to some of this stuff, and so it’s not always easy to do what you want. Sometimes that’s because the developers (especially in loose-knit groups) wanted to do other things, or at least different things.
In the short run there’s probably no good alternative to knowing a little HTML, though you can try and acquire that in small doses.
Trust me, I am not even a power user, let alone an expert. I found it helpful to learn a little about the code so I could understand the results that software like Dreamweaver accomplished. It’s a lot like knowing how to touch-type; not an essential skill but not one to avoid.
I see an analogy with Front Page, a Microsoft application that lets people create web pages without knowing hardly any HTML. The problem, from the technical side, is that FP tends to load up the code with stuff you don’t really want, and many hosting services don’t want to put up the pages since they require (or at least used to require) a dedicated server.
For me, all my life, my goals have affected what I choose to learn (as opposed to the things I’ve been required to learn). So I got out of Latin class in order to learn French; I skipped ahead in my teach-yourself-guitar book so I could learn bar chords so I could play the song I wanted to play; and I hopped around in Alan Levine’s excellent HTML tutorial (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/) because I had a mental image of the pages I wanted to build.
My Cousin Agam Fhéin site was my first experience with a blog, and I kept fiddling with things because I didn’t want the usual blog format. I’m still tinkering, but it now has all the basic features I first sketched out on a sheet of paper.
I found it helpful when I started with HTML to remind myself that there were thousands of 10-year-olds with their own web sites.
– Dave Ferguson